The Importance of Staff Meal

Because the South Florida restaurant business was seasonal, I left the Yacht Club and headed north in the summer to Newport, then Narragansett, Rhode Island, to look for work. My second year there, I met Roland Henin on the beach in Narragansett. He was chef at a place called the Dunes Club, a big hotel; he commanded a kitchen the size of a football field with a crew of forty cooks, and he needed someone to cook staff meal.

Henin was from Lyon, the gastronomic capital of the Western world. He was an old-school French guy, trained in the European apprentice system. There was Zeus, and there was Roland, god of cooking. He knew everything. He taught me how to peel a tomato, how to cook a green vegetable properly, things no one had taken the time to show me before. He taught me how to make stock, how to roast and braise.